From the course: Adobe Acrobat Pro Cert Prep

Making the document accessible: Alternate text and auto scrolling - Adobe Acrobat Tutorial

From the course: Adobe Acrobat Pro Cert Prep

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Making the document accessible: Alternate text and auto scrolling

“

- [Instructor] The last two accessibility features we're going to be taking a look at are using alt text or alternative text for images and the ability to use auto scrolling. So we have a lot of different options in here to make sure that all the areas of our document are correct and accessible. You can see a couple down here, let's see where the alternative text, let's click where that is. Alternative text or alt text is an issue with imagery. When we look at images, let's go up here to our logo. I imagine this is exactly where it is. This particular image is going to be an issue because even though as people that can view this without any problem will see exactly what it says and it's clear, if you're using assistive technology or if you have vision problems, this will just show up as an image and there's no way to tell what it's actually saying. So what we can do is we can try and select the image itself and Add alternate text. So what will happen is Acrobat will detect all figures in the document and display associated alternate text. And you'll see that here it is, there is an image here, but it needs alternate text. And so you can choose whether it's a decorative figure, in which case it would get ignored, or we can type in a description, Graphikos Student Design Studio logo. And so we can describe what it is and actually put the words that are visually there but are not in text and add that into our document. So when an assistive technology reader comes through, it will see this, it will read it out to the person using that technology, and it will help them understand better what they're experiencing. Another feature we want to add is the ability to automatically scroll through our document. Sometimes, it might be hard for somebody's hands, for example, to use a scroll wheel or to be as accurate as they need to be when it comes to using a scroll bar or anything like that to get through their documents. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just close out some of these options here just to get rid of some of those visual distractions, and we're going to go down here to the bottom right where we have all of our Zoom and Page Display options. And so if we click on this box here, we'll open up our Page Display options, and we can scroll down in that section to where it says Automatically scroll. And once we click on that, our pages will automatically begin to move. This will allow somebody to make use of one of the great tools for accessibility, and that is to scroll automatically. They don't have to use the mouse, the scroll wheel, the scroll bar on the right. It'll just allow them to read, and the text will move for them. Now if you use your Up and Down arrows, you can change both the speed and direction of the scrolling. So with the Down arrow, you can scroll down your pages, and the more you press it, the faster it will go. Just want to make sure you're not going too fast, otherwise you'll lose a lot of readability. To slow it down, you use the Up arrows, and if you get to a certain point, you press it enough times, it's going to start going the opposite direction. So you can scroll back up. But this way, again, you don't have to do a lot of the work. You allow Acrobat to do the work for you. Now to turn it off, simply go back into your Page Display settings, scroll down and click on Automatically scroll again, and that will turn that off for you. So as you're working, even as you're developing the project itself, make sure you are keeping these accessibility ideas in mind, whether that's adding alternate text, adding descriptions and titles to your page, to your form fields, to everything that you do, so that when your clients or your customers or your readers are coming to your document, they are able to have a fuller experience and get as much out of your project as possible.

Contents